A Slice Of Life On The Dawn Patrol - Articles California Sierra
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A Slice Of Life On The Dawn Patrol
By Shane Kelbley
a s l i c e o f l i f e o n t h e d a w n p a t r o l
by the corona kid... aka David Huebner
So what do you do when you're a ski bum snowed in two miles for the winter?
Me
Four twenty a.m I drag myself out of bed, the cat "Porch" is rather disturbed by the light, I can tell he's just thinking, "whoooaa, what the heck man?" But settles right back to curled up sleep. What the heck is right, as if I'm the kind of person who gets up at four twenty in the dang morning, but yeah, I'm motivated, heading for first tracks up high, north facing, steep, and dry, widely spaced trees.
By moon light, head lamp on my head but off, I skin up the road, and wow, what a night, er morning, no hint of sun yet, the sky is dark and the stars are bright and my poles squeak incessantly and my bindings, and skins and skis do too; it is really cold, I'm on fresh groomed. Turn the corner to head around the lake, and it is like my life: rotating ever on in this granite and snow world, thrown to the wind, wherever the breeze carries me, and I glide on under the light of a half moon plenty bright.
There's the sign, and the trail breaking begins...bringing the tips of my skis to the surface with each step in shin deep snow. I read the terrain by the open areas, the bright spots, avoiding grim talus fields and dark dense forests; I've never skied up this spot before.
The feeling of just doing something and not really knowing what exactly you're doing is the true feeling of being out there beyond the easy comfort zone of ordinary existence; the sort of go with it, fly by the seat of your pants attitude that I give to the backcountry lifestyle. There are people who would plan for a day and drive for another and spend a morning organizing for something like this. Here I am under the moon, before dawn, doing it with nothing but my day pack with a bottle of water and my camera around my neck. And living in the mountains allows this. Not to say uncaring is a good thing; I know what I know and I use that to get me farther. Slowly and steadily pushing the line.
I top out on the bench, run into the summer trail and feel back at home, I've hiked the trail bunches in the summer. Soon the regimen steps up a notch as the climb up to the gully begins. There it sits before me, light blue spreading from the eastern horizon now and I look up at my objective, the beautiful main gully loaded with powder.
Yeah, ten dozen thousand switchbacks and steep straights later I stand on top looking at a dream line, and the sun is approaching, and my legs are feeling weak from the climb and I drink some water, and snap a few photos, and my soul just soars loud and clear and far. Looking across at the crest I see back at myself and what I'm doing and that this life I live is beautiful, perfect, pure, there is no word, or combination of phrases, or language that can explain my feeling of standing there alone on a mountain, having stretched myself to a new height, a new level of euphoria, and right there and then I utter my standard "boatdrinks" to compliment my past, my city life long gone, my three years ago thought that no way in a million years could I ever be standing here doing what I'm doing now, that never would I be a bum, living free.
Snap a few buckles, pull the skins, flex the toes, the legs, quads still shaky, blown out, and look down on heaven. Pulling goggles over my eyes taking off pole straps and carving in the snow RCL D.P. with my ski pole...first tracks of the season for this slope, laid down on dawn patrol. The sun pokes over the crest just as I focus on my line, so I look up, take it in, another "yeah" and "boatdrinks" to the air and I'm off, like a drop of water down a bumpy slide, flowing, and fast, and soft, dry, deep, past pines, around pines, off rocks, ooohh such sweet soft landing and down into the main gully, pulling out like I'm on a wave, for one last swing back down the second fall line and out to the skin track and a few more turns and cruising back the way I came, and god, smiling big now, as the sun works its way down the peaks, fresh powder all over me from the knee deep and the deeper landing face shots, and just the overall sense of going big and pulling it off. A thousand vertical feet from pushing off I reach the flat again and head down the rocky, bushy, aspen-y slope I skinned up.
My morning has begun; it is eight a.m. when I put my skis back in the rack in the store, walk to my room, change, and get ready to wait tables at breakfast.
Jan
When I get up, Jan doesn't, she's in a different cabin, her little house, and she's in the so called non-motivational groove. After five a.m. Jan wakes up and goes out on her porch and splits a little wood for her fire to warm her place up. In her mind this is a clothing optional use activity.
Once the fire is stoked she lies in bed and loves it. Sleeping in. Later, maybe an hour and a half, she looks out her window at a 12,000 foot peak, as the sunrise is beginning. She goes back to sleep briefly and wakes up as light is in full swing on the peak out her window. She gets out of bed for good, grabbing clothes from the closet so she doesn't have to get out of her warm bed until absolutely neccesary. Once up, she heads to the kitchen, as she has been for the past fifteen winters. Burnt out on the mountain scene yet? Nope, she's not, still doing it after all these years, and this year has been easy for her so far, and she's happy about that and just plain happy at the water ouzel going off out on the creek behind the store as she approaches the kitchen. She can't think of a better life, and I can't either at this point as I rip down the powder almost two thousand feet above her. The water ouzel sings a beauty this morning she thinks.
Jan gets a fire going in the cold dining room, gets out preparations for breakfast, turns hot water on, gets the coffee machine going, which she has abstained from for months now, the hot water boils, and a cup of tea wakes her up to yet another beautiful day in the mountains. The kitchen is cold and quiet. Back to her cabin to organize for a bit being one of us who has a lot of stuff and just never quite the space to put it all. She brings her room back from the edge of hysteria and then returns to the kitchen and fires up the grill. Today: pancakes, eggs, and bacon, for 10 guests.
She thinks about whether she really wants to keep doing this, after so long, and yet it doesn't feel like it has really been that long, and where would she go? Home right now is The Promised Land, a paradise, and she feels it, especially in her morning tea, getting ready for breakfast in the cold quiet kitchen as sunlight paints the snow covered peaks orange and yellow, and the Grandfather tree sways ever so slightly only in the tips of the top most limbs as the cold air rushes into the valley.
She knows her home, these trees, the creek, the pond, the lake. She loves her home. She knows and yet she also continues to debate her 15 years spent living in the same canyon. She wonders if a beautiful woman like her will finish her life in the mountains single? She wonders if all those she knows who have left, and apparently "moved on" are somehow living a more fulfilling life.
She steps outside briefly and sips her tea, she knows I'm out, gone up high early. She smiles because that is what we do here. She knows that really at that moment, watching a wild natural world awaken all around her with a rushing creek for constant background, she would not want to be anywhere else. She thinks that living day to day, moment by moment, in the rush, flow, and feel, is the way to live. She tries to not really put much thought on anything but how beautiful the moment is.
She walks back into the kitchen and gets to work, starting the bacon, adding a log to the dining room fire, dealing with no running water; the garden hose running our system froze with the three degree overnight low. Nothing's ever easy she thinks.
I walk in, and she's got the operation in full swing, still no running water, hose is in the sauna, drain's frozen too. As I step in the door my smile runs from ear to ear, she turns, flashing that great smile she has too and asks, "So, did you do it?"
"Yeah baby, yeah."
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A Slice Of Life On The Dawn Patrol
Destinations North America United States California Sierra Travel Guides Articles A Slice Of Life On The Dawn Patrol
By Shane Kelbley
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a s l i c e o f l i f e o n t h e d a w n p a t r o lby the corona kid... aka David Huebner
So what do you do when you're a ski bum snowed in two miles for the winter?
Me
Four twenty a.m I drag myself out of bed, the cat "Porch" is rather disturbed by the light, I can tell he's just thinking, "whoooaa, what the heck man?" But settles right back to curled up sleep. What the heck is right, as if I'm the kind of person who gets up at four twenty in the dang morning, but yeah, I'm motivated, heading for first tracks up high, north facing, steep, and dry, widely spaced trees.
By moon light, head lamp on my head but off, I skin up the road, and wow, what a night, er morning, no hint of sun yet, the sky is dark and the stars are bright and my poles squeak incessantly and my bindings, and skins and skis do too; it is really cold, I'm on fresh groomed. Turn the corner to head around the lake, and it is like my life: rotating ever on in this granite and snow world, thrown to the wind, wherever the breeze carries me, and I glide on under the light of a half moon plenty bright.
There's the sign, and the trail breaking begins...bringing the tips of my skis to the surface with each step in shin deep snow. I read the terrain by the open areas, the bright spots, avoiding grim talus fields and dark dense forests; I've never skied up this spot before.
The feeling of just doing something and not really knowing what exactly you're doing is the true feeling of being out there beyond the easy comfort zone of ordinary existence; the sort of go with it, fly by the seat of your pants attitude that I give to the backcountry lifestyle. There are people who would plan for a day and drive for another and spend a morning organizing for something like this. Here I am under the moon, before dawn, doing it with nothing but my day pack with a bottle of water and my camera around my neck. And living in the mountains allows this. Not to say uncaring is a good thing; I know what I know and I use that to get me farther. Slowly and steadily pushing the line.
I top out on the bench, run into the summer trail and feel back at home, I've hiked the trail bunches in the summer. Soon the regimen steps up a notch as the climb up to the gully begins. There it sits before me, light blue spreading from the eastern horizon now and I look up at my objective, the beautiful main gully loaded with powder.
Yeah, ten dozen thousand switchbacks and steep straights later I stand on top looking at a dream line, and the sun is approaching, and my legs are feeling weak from the climb and I drink some water, and snap a few photos, and my soul just soars loud and clear and far. Looking across at the crest I see back at myself and what I'm doing and that this life I live is beautiful, perfect, pure, there is no word, or combination of phrases, or language that can explain my feeling of standing there alone on a mountain, having stretched myself to a new height, a new level of euphoria, and right there and then I utter my standard "boatdrinks" to compliment my past, my city life long gone, my three years ago thought that no way in a million years could I ever be standing here doing what I'm doing now, that never would I be a bum, living free.
Snap a few buckles, pull the skins, flex the toes, the legs, quads still shaky, blown out, and look down on heaven. Pulling goggles over my eyes taking off pole straps and carving in the snow RCL D.P. with my ski pole...first tracks of the season for this slope, laid down on dawn patrol. The sun pokes over the crest just as I focus on my line, so I look up, take it in, another "yeah" and "boatdrinks" to the air and I'm off, like a drop of water down a bumpy slide, flowing, and fast, and soft, dry, deep, past pines, around pines, off rocks, ooohh such sweet soft landing and down into the main gully, pulling out like I'm on a wave, for one last swing back down the second fall line and out to the skin track and a few more turns and cruising back the way I came, and god, smiling big now, as the sun works its way down the peaks, fresh powder all over me from the knee deep and the deeper landing face shots, and just the overall sense of going big and pulling it off. A thousand vertical feet from pushing off I reach the flat again and head down the rocky, bushy, aspen-y slope I skinned up.
My morning has begun; it is eight a.m. when I put my skis back in the rack in the store, walk to my room, change, and get ready to wait tables at breakfast.
Jan
When I get up, Jan doesn't, she's in a different cabin, her little house, and she's in the so called non-motivational groove. After five a.m. Jan wakes up and goes out on her porch and splits a little wood for her fire to warm her place up. In her mind this is a clothing optional use activity.
Once the fire is stoked she lies in bed and loves it. Sleeping in. Later, maybe an hour and a half, she looks out her window at a 12,000 foot peak, as the sunrise is beginning. She goes back to sleep briefly and wakes up as light is in full swing on the peak out her window. She gets out of bed for good, grabbing clothes from the closet so she doesn't have to get out of her warm bed until absolutely neccesary. Once up, she heads to the kitchen, as she has been for the past fifteen winters. Burnt out on the mountain scene yet? Nope, she's not, still doing it after all these years, and this year has been easy for her so far, and she's happy about that and just plain happy at the water ouzel going off out on the creek behind the store as she approaches the kitchen. She can't think of a better life, and I can't either at this point as I rip down the powder almost two thousand feet above her. The water ouzel sings a beauty this morning she thinks.
Jan gets a fire going in the cold dining room, gets out preparations for breakfast, turns hot water on, gets the coffee machine going, which she has abstained from for months now, the hot water boils, and a cup of tea wakes her up to yet another beautiful day in the mountains. The kitchen is cold and quiet. Back to her cabin to organize for a bit being one of us who has a lot of stuff and just never quite the space to put it all. She brings her room back from the edge of hysteria and then returns to the kitchen and fires up the grill. Today: pancakes, eggs, and bacon, for 10 guests.
She thinks about whether she really wants to keep doing this, after so long, and yet it doesn't feel like it has really been that long, and where would she go? Home right now is The Promised Land, a paradise, and she feels it, especially in her morning tea, getting ready for breakfast in the cold quiet kitchen as sunlight paints the snow covered peaks orange and yellow, and the Grandfather tree sways ever so slightly only in the tips of the top most limbs as the cold air rushes into the valley.
She knows her home, these trees, the creek, the pond, the lake. She loves her home. She knows and yet she also continues to debate her 15 years spent living in the same canyon. She wonders if a beautiful woman like her will finish her life in the mountains single? She wonders if all those she knows who have left, and apparently "moved on" are somehow living a more fulfilling life.
She steps outside briefly and sips her tea, she knows I'm out, gone up high early. She smiles because that is what we do here. She knows that really at that moment, watching a wild natural world awaken all around her with a rushing creek for constant background, she would not want to be anywhere else. She thinks that living day to day, moment by moment, in the rush, flow, and feel, is the way to live. She tries to not really put much thought on anything but how beautiful the moment is.
She walks back into the kitchen and gets to work, starting the bacon, adding a log to the dining room fire, dealing with no running water; the garden hose running our system froze with the three degree overnight low. Nothing's ever easy she thinks.
I walk in, and she's got the operation in full swing, still no running water, hose is in the sauna, drain's frozen too. As I step in the door my smile runs from ear to ear, she turns, flashing that great smile she has too and asks, "So, did you do it?"
"Yeah baby, yeah."
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